A little voice bellowing in the masses.

America had to make the most of two bad choices when it voted in 2016. One was viewed as corrupt and the other as a narcissistic, racist misogynist.

Okaaaay, it turns out that an old rich white guy who thinks its ok to grab your daughters pussy, is the choice of the American voter. I don’t know if American voters really intended for Trump to get in, I think they simply wanted an acknowledgement of their pain by a large swing in the polls.

Much to everyone’s surprise the protest vote won.

So why is Auntie Angie a flaming skull?

Because the election of Trump has made it ok to be a narcissistic, racist misogynist in Australia too and we don’t need any more encouragement.

Political groups like One Nation, famous for being anti-everyone that’s not a blue eyed white person are gaining huge bounds in the popularity polls. Extreme right wing and White supremacist groups, masquerading as vigilantes saving us from the brown terror are rising in numbers and lowering the collective IQ of the country.

Once they would have been ignored by the media and regarded as a slightly brain damaged cousin at the family BBQ, now these people are getting attention and a voice. They speak for “us”. The disenfranchised and the downtrodden, those who of us who say they can’t get a job because some poor bugger who arrived in Australia by boat is stealing their jobs.

Seriously? If you can’t get a job because a refugee who doesn’t speak English and has no qualifications is a better candidate than you, then you need to look deep into your mean little bogan heart and reassess your job and life skills.

It’s not ok to be a bigot or a racist or a misogynist. Never.

Stop being polite when friends or family say this sort of shit. Call them out on this behavior, they only get away with it because people “don’t want to cause trouble” or can’t be bothered with the conflict.

By not calling them out for their shit, by not saying “that’s racist/sexist” there is an unspoken approval of their abhorrent behaviour. If people are not questioned about why they believe something, they will assume you agree with them – even if you don’t.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Edmund Burke

When the run on the banks and the stock market started during the GFC it happened in a rush. It was like watching milk boiling in a pan, one minute it’s a flat creamy surface, then suddenly it’s a frothy mess, hurtling over the edge and scorching everything into a stinking charred mess.

According to UBS, a Swiss financial group which accesses investor risk, the risk of a property bubble is very high. The truly scary part is how wide spread the bubbles are. Europe, North America, Asia and Australia all have major cities that are in very high risk territory and numerous other cities are overvalued. The graph above shows some of the risk.

The big question is what will the catalyst be this time?

The last time it was Lehman’s bank, this time it could be Deutsche Bank.

Deutsche bank is Germany’s largest bank. It’s bastion of stability in Europe and generally regarded as being a safe and reliable institution. But is it?

The US Department of Justice is claiming Deutsche Bank owes it $14 billion dollars for its involvement in the US subprime market debacle. They are fighting this as it is nearly all of the banks capitalization and would literally break it. Deutsche bank’s share price is the lowest since 1992 and still dropping with the contagion spreading to other bank stock values.

Deutsche Bank also has a $42 trillion dollar exposure to derivatives. Not billion, trillion. Derivatives were one of the major triggers in the GFC.

Anyone else getting a sense of deja vu? Like we have seen this before? Risk is on, properties over valued and derivatives screaming through the financial system. I seriously want to clap my hand to my forehead and shout at these people.

“YOU’RE DOING IT AGAIN DICKHEADS!”

Angela Merkel and the German government have said they won’t bail out the banks, they will let them go bust. This will go through Europe like hammer down the edge of a glass tower.

If this happens, fear sets into the markets. The banks stop lending and we have a liquidity crisis. It will be impossible to get a loan without a massive deposit and large assets as collateral. This reduction in buyers means increasing stock levels and sellers will be forced to compete with each other by dropping their prices. The seller may end up with the property being “under water” where the property is worth less than they paid for it and end up in a foul place called Negative Equity.

Buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and result will be another GFC.

“Oh Mummy, you have wiped my bum, made my lunches, paid for all my education, now I deserve a year’s holiday for learning the basics of reading and writing.”

Seriously people, the kid has done nothing.

Have a look at other kids who have had a gap year. Are they successful? Have they gone on to university? Some will but how many of them are working as barista’s in some trendy cafe with no clear life plan after they have finished their Gap year?

They shouldn’t get a paid year off to find out what they want to do with their life. That’s what the school guidance counsellors are for. The only thing they will find out at the end of their gap year is that its nice to have Mum and Dad pay for everything and that they like to travel. No surprises there, everyone likes to travel at someone else’s expense.

I guess that the real point this post – what benefit is there in a Gap Year? It doesn’t seem to result in more focused successful adults and simply adds to the financial burden of parents who should be using that money to fund their own Gap year.

Maybe it’s all backwards, perhaps it’s the parents who deserve a Gap year. For raising your kids, for being there for them for eighteen years non-stop, for putting up with their shit both literally and figuratively.

I propose that parents take a Gap year or a child free sabbatical.

They have done the hard work and have earned it, unlike the kids who have yet to accomplish anything.

The Australian government is talking about raising the GST* level from 10% to 15%

Why? Because, like most governments they waste a lot of money and spend more than they earn.

The easiest way to raise money is to increase the tax that is applied to everything and collected by businesses. The government doesn’t have to do anything except change a 10% to a 15%

Lemon jelly could come with better ideas than this.

It’s the laziest way to raise money. It shows and utter lack of intellect, cognitive function and creativity by the people who are charged with running the country.

To top it off, there has been no discussion of alternatives or even any attempt to look at who might be most affected by this change.

Its the poor of course. The poor spend all of their income on surviving. They live pay check to pay check and their only focus is on survival and paying the next bill. There is simply no money left over for savings or overseas holidays. Or any holidays. Ever.

Things like Capital Gains Tax are ignored, negative gearing on housing is ignored and taxing the wealthy is ignored. I’m not surprised at the last one, given that the current Australian Prime Minister is a hugely wealthy individual. Why would he shoot himself in the foot?

The ironic thing is that much of the thinking has already been done for our politicians. There has been the Henry Tax review and numerous other think tanks with some quite brilliant ideas. Most of these would be better off lining a budgie cage because at least the paper would be put to some use, rather than the wilful avoidance they are currently experiencing.

Being the Lucky Country isn’t enough, we need to be smarter. Smarter than lemon jelly is a starting point.

*The GST here is the equivalant of VAT in England or the State and government taxes in North America.

Obama’s recent and rare use of the presidential veto got me thinking about where people get their guns from. This train of thought expanded out to IS/Daesh, Hezbollah, Boko Haram, Hamas, the Taliban and other terrorist groups.

We know these guys are committing horrific atrocities, that they are annexing large areas of the middle east and everyone agrees they must be stopped. The best way to do this would be to cut off their power in the form of their weapons.

Without ammunition or guns, they would be reduced to hurling rocks, Molotov cocktails and street fights. Bad but not as bad as a sub machine gun used to slaughter an entire village.

If they are cut off from the weapons supply and these terrorist groups lose their power. They become another bunch of disgruntled men shouting at each other.

Some of the most common weapons are the Chinese or Russian Kalashnikov and RPK, The American M16 and the German MP5.

So where are these groups getting the guns and ammo from? In the case of Daesh, many of them were looted from the government but the continued supply of ammo has to come from elsewhere.

Then it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard of the arrest of an international arms dealer in years, maybe even decades. They had quietly faded out of the public eye and back into the shadows.

When you add President Putin’s recent support of Syria’s Assad regime, a leader that everyone things should be removed from office, it becomes clearer.

Russia has had some nasty economic shocks since the GFC. Its main exports are oil, petroleum products and steel. The price of all of these commodities has dropped dramatically in recent years, oil for example going from $110 a barrel to the current $36. That is going to be hurting their current account deficit.

China also has similar issues.

A product is product and maybe they just want to make a sale but this looks like state sponsored terrorism to me, but not with an idealogical view but an economic one.

And I’m not just calling out Russia on this one. The US, Germany, Croatia and many other counties are supporting terrorism by not cracking down on arms dealers that operate out of their countries, state sponsored or not.

579 major companies earn over $100 million dollars AUD a year don’t pay any tax in Australia.

One of these companies, picked because it was near the top of the list and at random, is Australian Pharmaceutical Industries. This ASX listed company owns Soul Pattinson Chemist, Priceline Pharmacies and supplies a large list of products to independent pharmacies. API makes over $3.3 billion dollars a year.

$3.3 billion a year and pays no tax.

I was going to write about corporate governance, debt, change in market conditions, trading while insolvent and a few other ways that a company could trade this much money and not make a profit but you know it would be a cover up for corporate bastardry. The truth is its all bull shit, weasel words and spin doctors. These companies, not just API, all 579 of them, don’t pay tax because they have found a way to avoid it.

The simple fact is its stealing from the people of Australia.

In allowing this to happen, the Australian government is complicit in the theft. Both the LNP and Labor have allowed these companies to steal from the rest of Australia for a very long time.

There comes a time where every nice lady has had enough. We have seen and heard most of your shit before. Doesn’t matter if you are a politician, a public figure, a criminal or family, we are sick of hearing your crappy excuses and in this little blog, one fed up little woman is going to call you out for it.